[chbot] Playing with a Pi 400.

Sun Jan 24 10:01:28 GMT 2021

There are a few gotchas using the RPi4 4GB as my desktop using raspian. The
dual HDMI monitor setup 1920x1080 is great compared to laptop + external
monitor.
I use a 500GB Samsung T5 SDD as my home partition, so I can swap raspian
for ubuntu etc by sd card swap and still have my files in place.
Web browsing can be a bit slower that my Samsung Galaxy S9, maybe because
I'm still booting from SD?
I've not managed to get Netflix and TVNZ on demand working, maybe partly
due to Chromium rather than Chrome browser?
Youtube videos sometimes lockup for me on firefox.
No microphone or camera with the standard setup.
The chips get warm so I have a gpio pin controlled variable speed fan.
Currently spinning v quietly at 52°C measured temp. I ran my first fan at
full speed and it got noisy after a few months.
Almost a deal breaker for me was lack of vscode intellisense arm support
which I think was fixed some months back.
Unless you create and enable swap the pi would lock up with about ten tabs
open in chromium.
I built a small mdf enclosure to hold together the RPI, cables, sdd, and 7
port USB hub.
Most surprising for me is how well it all works. Everything I have tried
from github for eps8266 and avr so far just builds and runs and I'm
guessing that nearly everything was built and tested on x86.
I set up the Rpi4 as an experiment and just carried on using it.

For Volker here is the output of : $ sudo smartctl --info /dev/sda -d sat
smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [armv7l-linux-4.19.66-v7l+] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     Samsung Portable SSD T5
Serial Number:    S50TNV0M700986F
LU WWN Device Id: 5 002538 e00000000
Firmware Version: MVT42P1Q
User Capacity:    500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    Solid State Device
Form Factor:      mSATA
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2, ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4c
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Sun Jan 24 22:59:08 2021 NZDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Cheers

Richard Jones

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 10:02 PM Andrew Starr <ajstarr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> So you're happy with the RPi4 as your daily use machine? I'm seriously
> considering this to replace my aging i3 All-in-one.
>
> Cheers
>
> Andrew
> On 21/01/21 2:33 pm, Richard Jones wrote:
>
> I use RPi 4 with dual monitors as my main desktop machine daily. I use a
> Samsung Portable SSD T5 500GB, bought from PBtech just about as soon as
> RPi4 came out. The  was possibly not the cheapest solution but hardware
> wise its plug and play and readily available. I reckoned that if I ever
> needed more space then SSD's would have reduced in price. Creating and
> enabling a swap partition prevents the pi locking up when Firefox or
> Chromium have too many active tabs. The SSD is just used as my home drive
> as USB booting from SSD arrived after I had my setup all working. Let me
> know if you would like some measurements done.
>
> Looking at the PBTech web site it looks as though the T5 has been replaced
> by T7.
>
> I moved to Pi after blowing up my laptop motherboard using a new chinese
> usb supply on a usb connected arduino nano. The supply was well designed
> but was manufactured with a sticky foam pad bridging the safety barrier.
> Consequently I bought a new laptop motherboard, rpi, and a HV insulation
> tester! If I'm ever daft enough to repeat the mistake I'm hoping to just
> replace the Pi.
>
> HTH
>
> Richard Jones
>
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 8:49 AM Quentin McDonald <dqmcdonald at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Mike,
>>
>> Would you mind letting us know what SSD you ended up getting and from
>> where? I've looked into this briefly and I couldn't seem to figure out how
>> to find one of the Pi compatible ones known to work.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Quentin
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 5:14 PM hamster <hamster at snap.net.nz> wrote:
>>
>>> Just saw an article on reverse engineering of vaccines that may be of
>>> interest some here.
>>>
>>>
>>> https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/
>>>
>>> And for something more aligned to the list, I replaced my Windows
>>> Laptop after I discovered my Raspberry Pi 400 compiled the same C source in
>>> ~40% of the time. So I went to the New Years sales and $1100 later the
>>> Raspberry Pi is still quicker.
>>>
>>> To reward it for its efforts I now have the Pi booting from a $69 USB3
>>> SSD rather than usual uSD card. It now reads disk at 300MB/s.
>>>
>>> It is much more capable than expected.
>>>
>>> Mike
>>>
>>>
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